Today, technology allows multiple parties from all over the world to communicate with each other in organized communications forums. For instance, groups of individuals miles apart can easily discuss complex issues and exchange ideas via text sessions (e.g., chat rooms), voice sessions (e.g., teleconferences), or other forms of communication common in distributed organizations. Regardless of how convenient multi-party communications have become, there continues to be a fundamental challenge with group communications. During complex group interactions, raising new topics or influencing a topic change continues to be a major issue.
In general, communicating parties have difficulty raising new discussion topics. For example, during audio and video communications, it is considered impolite to interrupt a speaker in many cultures. Alternatively, raising new topics may be difficult because an overbearing speaker is adamant and aggressive about a topic being discussed. In many instances, no matter how important a topic is or the number of participants supporting a topic, an aggressive and confident participant has a better chance of influencing the direction of a discussion over a more passive participant.
Additional problems exist in text forums. Although text forums allow multiple users to write instant messages in parallel, which encourages users to raise new discussion topics, the general discussion becomes fragmented due to numerous threads occupying the same chat window. Such discussions are often difficult to follow. Further, although it is easier to introduce new topics in a text forum, only a limited number of topics can be discussed in detail because there is a lack of focus between the communicating parties when too many topics are introduced.
Many conventional technologies fail to facilitate organized group discussion. For example, some forums are accompanied by a support system, such as a meeting room, chat program, etc. These tools allow users to set static topics in advance (e.g., setting a chat room description). However, these tools do not help users raise new topics or influence a topic change during group interactions. Further, even if an agenda is set in advance, the direction of a group discussion remains unregulated. For example, too much focus may be spent on a specific topic, a discussion may diverge to an unimportant topic related to the current topic, and/or a discussion may diverge to a totally unrelated topic. Frequently, the direction of a group discussion largely depends on the associative thinking of the more aggressive parties in the group; those who are able to divert the discussion to their will. Therefore, the decisions on what items to discuss are not explicitly made, but are determined by the flow of thought of one or more influential participants. This form of biased agenda-setting may direct a communication towards unimportant topics and away from important topics.